Wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) – the analysis of water and environmental samples like sewage to enable early, non-invasive tracking of biological and chemical markers across a population – is a powerful and increasingly common public health tool. When paired with clinical data, it offers a real-time window into community health that can inform faster, more targeted responses to infectious disease. However, its use in carceral settings like jails and prisons remains ethically underexamined.

 

In a brief analytic essay in the American Journal of Public Health, a team comprised of Boston University and University of Louisville researchers found that carceral WES is neither fully covered by human subjects protections nor fully accountable to traditional public health guidelines, producing a fragmented regulatory landscape in which some safeguards impede informed and effective research while others fail to prevent misuse or harm to incarcerated individuals and surrounding communities.

In a new NIH-supported study in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, researchers detected significant risk associations for vascular and Alzheimer’s dementias among American Indians for four previously-identified key risk factors: limited education, hypertension, social isolation, and depression.

For immediate release.  A new review in the journal Nutrients brings together findings from three large European research consortia — SWEET, SWITCH, and Sweet Tooth — to address longstanding questions about whether non-nutritive sweeteners (NNSs) and sweet-tasting foods in general affect body weight, metabolic health, and people's taste preferences over time. 

The VCU and Pitt-led study is the first of its kind in the United States to assess the cardiovascular impact of hormone therapy during perimenopause.

The strain of Mpox behind the 2022 outbreak was a weakened form of the virus, which may have helped to spread it faster, a new study from the University of Surrey reports. The findings show that the virus acquired mutations before it spread globally. These mutations, which are absent in current circulating forms of the virus in parts of Africa, cause less severe symptoms in patients, who unknowingly may have spread the virus across borders.